Weekend Watch: ‘The Neon Demon’ Is Dull and Beautiful and Ugly and Unforgettable

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That the world of modeling could be so divorced from reality as to be a surrealistic horror show is not entirely a unique one. When The Neon Demon released its first trailer, all anybody could think of was the Dario Argento horror classic Suspiria, which sets a school for models amid a coven of witches and descends into artfully bloody chaos. The idea that an industry built on the primacy of the beauty ideal would be besieged by violence and horror is a natural one, and while director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive) pursues just that idea in The Neon Demon, his execution is indulgent, and not always in the right ways.

The first hour of The Neon Demon is unsettling, yes, but also unimaginably slow. Elle Fanning plays Jesse, a teenage aspiring model who moves to Los Angeles and immediately catches the eye of photographers, modeling agencies, and her fellow models, all of whom affirm her otherworldly, superior beauty. Everyone sees something different in Jesse’s beauty: Christina Hendricks, as an agency executive, sees dollar signs. The photographers (and a makeup artist, played by Jena Malone) see her sexuality. The other models see a new rival. This would all be perfect fodder for over-the-top, soapy intrigue, but Refn plays it as slow as humanly possible, with long, silent stretches and shots that last long past the point where the audience has gleaned all it’s going to glean from an image.

Jesse meets an odd cast of characters. Abbey Lee and Bella Heathcote as her rival models, who are threatened to the point of despair at Jesse’s imposition into their lives. An early scene where Lee licks blood off of Jesse’s hand offers a pretty accurate omen for where things are going.

Alessandro Nivola plays a slimy Hollywood type. Karl Glusman, whom you might remember from his performance in the Gaspar Noe unsimulated-sex movie Love, plays a cute young photographer who seems to see beyond Jesse’s beauty, though I hope you don’t get too attached to his character, because he’s rather unceremoniously forgotten by the film’s midpoint.

Elle Fanning is the perfect actress to play Jesse. She’s always possessed an otherworldliness that fits well here in the modeling world. Her journey from naive transplant to narcissistic grist for the beauty mill isn’t in any way novel, but Fanning plays it as an inevitable trajectory for someone who looks very much not of this realm.

While the first half of The Neon Demon is almost offensively languorous in its pacing and stillness, its second half makes up for it with some of the most lurid, horrific, frankly insane twists and turns you could possibly imagine. It would be wrong to lay out those twists and turns here, but Refn displays an almost manic desire to make up for lost time, as these scenes blend violence, sexuality, saturated colors, and dreamlike atmospheres into a body-horror nightmare. There’s that old idea that’s permeated into so many horrific tales about beautiful monsters consuming the blood of virgins to maintain their beauty. It feels like The Neon Demon is the result of Winding Refn reading that line somewhere and deciding that what that sentence needed was more. More everything.

Is The Neon Demon a good movie? I’m not sure it is. But it is a wildly memorable one. No movie that begins as dully as The Neon Demon should turn out to be so indelible in its final third, but that’s what we have here. It’s pretty and dull right up until the point that it becomes ugly and unforgettable.